ambush on air: Live from Directions with Scott from Momentum

Sam Busch: Hello, hello and welcome to this episode of Amishon Air. I am your host, Sam Busch, and as always, bringing you topical content all around. Sales, marketing and partnerships in the Microsoft ecosystem. I am live here at ah, Directions North America. And to prove it, I've got the step and repeat behind me and looking official. Okay, so I'm here for business. I'm here as a media sponsor. I'm hanging out with new friends, old friends. My arch nemesis is here and we've already had a nice little combative chat. I am sitting down with Colin from Momentum. We just met. So you know these are my favorite ones, right? So, Colin, tell me a little about who you are, what you do. What the hell are you doing here?

Colin: Well, I actually was here for uh, Disney and just. This looked like a fun.

Sam Busch: Which park did you go to?

Colin: None. I just wandered in here instead.

Sam Busch: No, you gotta go to Epcot and ride Guardians.

Colin: All right, so I haven't been. I've done the Guardians. Haven't done the Epcot, done the Universal, but not the Disney.

Sam Busch: Okay, I'm a Harry Potter girl, so I get it.

Colin: No, no, my. My oldest kid got picked to do the wand thing and I have a thing. We have to.

Sam Busch: I have a cloak.

Colin: That's how they get you.

Sam Busch: Yeah. Oh, yeah. They hook you in. They're like, this is $100. But you won. Yes, we won. Your money.

Colin: All these other children here, we picked you.

Sam Busch: We picked you because you guys look like you. You don't have. You're not ready for it. So we're going to give it to you and you're. We're going to make your kid want it. So you have to say yes or they'll crash out.

Colin: It was great because the wand didn't even make it all the way back to Georgia.

Sam Busch: We didn't even take her home.

Colin: No, no, we did. It's in the car somewhere still, probably.

Sam Busch: Oh, I love that. I love that. Okay. Okay, so we.

Colin: We have a partnership with one of the board members here at Directions and, uh, one of my people has come. Amy Ward is her name. She's been to Directions for three years now and she's had a blast every time she shows up.

Sam Busch: My favorite show.

Colin: And she. It's hers too. And so she's been on me about showing up. So I did.

Sam Busch: Yeah. Okay, so this is your first one.

Colin: First one.

Sam Busch: Oh, wow.

Colin: Genesis right here. And it was great. We did, um. We did the hangout at Rocks last night.

Sam Busch: As you must.

Colin: And um, you know, it was. It was going so well. Even after they turned off all the lights and stopped pushing booze out the door.

Sam Busch: And they're like, somebody went and got

Colin: pizza and, like, just so they could all stay and hang out that. I want to be part of that. I can. I can. I can work with that.

Sam Busch: Oh, yeah. Welcome in. So I have been. This is my ninth direction. I'm a. I'm a 10 years old. You guys know, I'm super young. I am younger than most of you, but I am so enamored by this community of collaboration. And my first directions, there was a group of people in the lobby who ordered Taco Bell. And Taco Bell is my love language. I used to be a vegetarian for a long time. And they're like, black bean potato situation unmatched. So that's how I got kind of m into this. And now I'm usually the pizza party, 2:00am It's.

Colin: It's incredible. It's. I haven't had that experience at any other.

Sam Busch: You never will.

Colin: Probably eight to ten of these a year.

Sam Busch: Okay.

Colin: Across a range of different environments, yet to have had pizza show up at

Sam Busch: 2:00am um, anywhere else, definitely. You're definitely not getting that at a netsuite show or an SAP show. Those people are buttoned up and they're kind of like, don't talk to me.

Colin: That whole thing dies at 8.

Sam Busch: Yeah. Oh, yeah. The party's over. Everyone's in bed.

Colin: Well, this ain't.

Sam Busch: No. This is. I'm hanging out with my friends, and we have no customers here. We have no prospects here. So we're really focused on relationship and trust and. And all of that. So I love it.

Colin: I'm picking that up. Uh, the. The whole relationship building thing here. And. And you'll get people who are just point guards for relationship. They're dishing the ball left and right. And I got introduced to probably two or three hundred people yesterday.

Sam Busch: Oh, absolutely.

Colin: And I'll remember almost all of them because they're all great. Really. And Maybe it's not 200, but it was a.

Sam Busch: It probably was.

Colin: And everybody was open to it.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: And that's. No one's having to play defense here. Get to an event like this. Nobody's playing defense. Yeah, it's rare.

Sam Busch: It's very rare. It's very rare. That's why. It's just this conference is always my, like, guiding. I can't wait to go. I'm excited to be here. Uh, everyone who listens knows I'm actually at a FNO, uh, only partner called Do OpNow. So I'm actually not even in Business Central. And I still came because I'm like, I have to be here, actually. And most of these. These partners all sell both, so it works in that benefit, obviously, but.

Colin: Well, I'm glad you brought it, but I can't miss it because I'm challenged with all the acronyms.

Sam Busch: We have a lot.

Colin: Yeah, yeah.

Sam Busch: And so in Microsoft, they have even more. And every day they're changing. They try to change the acronym for ISV to something that I will never remember, but I'm like, it's being called. An ISV is actually across a hundred other ecosystems.

Colin: Right.

Sam Busch: You can't change it. It already exists everywhere. And they're like, no, we can't. And I'm like, no, we're not adopting.

Colin: We're almost put a timestamp on you, don't they?

Sam Busch: Yes.

Colin: You know, uh, and so I work a ton in the Internet service provider.

Sam Busch: Provider. Okay.

Colin: There are guys who are ISPs, and then some people are BSPs, service providers, and some people are wisps. And you put yourself in a wireless Internet service.

Sam Busch: Oh, I've never heard that one. Yeah.

Colin: Uh, so, Brent, see, I'm bringing my own acronym.

Sam Busch: Exactly, Exactly. We need a spreadsheet.

Colin: Age yourself and date yourself. You sort of the carbon dating of. Of the broadband world. And I think it's probably that here, there'll be people who come here in a couple years who never KNEW they were ISVs.

Sam Busch: Absolutely.

Colin: Because that term's not around anymore.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: People who will be isp.

Sam Busch: Like, now I'm one of those. I got gray hair. I love it. Okay, so what do you guys do at Momentum?

Colin: So Momentum's job, if I can get pedantic about it. It's a podcast, right? That's what we do.

Sam Busch: Yeah. We're getting in. We're locking in.

Colin: So, uh, as everybody takes infrastructure out of their closet into the cloud, one of the things that we think is important is to do that with your communications as well. Where we play in the Microsoft space especially is we're voice enablement for teams.

Sam Busch: Okay.

Colin: So if you think about a lot of the companies and our verticals range broadly. Uh, but one of them is manufacturing. If you think about how much stuff you've got to maintain to run a manufacturing facility.

Sam Busch: Yes.

Colin: And then how much of that stuff is critical to manufacturing things. And then how much of that stuff is just could. If we could put it somewhere else, we would put it somewhere else.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: So we take all that stuff you want to put somewhere else.

Sam Busch: Huh.

Colin: And we absorb It. Teams is the most widely used communication tool on the planet.

Sam Busch: I hate it, but it is.

Colin: It is.

Sam Busch: It never. It, like, has. I have a Mac because I'm a marketer, and you have to have a Mac as a marketer. If you don't, then you're not really a marketer. Am I? You guys know that's how I feel. Um, but Teams hates my computer. It really does. Like, some days I'll log into Teams and it'll be like, the. The camera doesn't work for you today. You don't get it All Macs, it's all Max. All of us have this problem. We get really irritated. I'm like, can we just go back to Zoom? But I will say, as a Microsoft girl, I'm, um, only Microsoft ecosystem. Finally. I used to be spread thin across. Across all these ones, and now I'm just in Microsoft. Yeah. So I have to play these games now. So I'm starting to like her again.

Colin: It can be a challenge to move off of something that you actually hold in your hand and you're used to.

Sam Busch: Yes.

Colin: And in some cases, you still need that. And so we do some of that still.

Sam Busch: Okay, good.

Colin: So if you're, you know, the guy who's on the floor and you need to talk to somebody who's not on the floor, who's upstairs, we can make it so you can pick something up, but goes to the person you go to. For the most part, we work in this space and we partner with, uh, other ISVs.

Sam Busch: Okay.

Colin: To create pathways to monetize that. So the name of the game for a lot of ISVs is recurring and Teams, uh, is the most used Microsoft product on the planet. Right.

Sam Busch: Oh, I didn't know that.

Colin: Yeah. So if. If you're able to tie revenue generation to the most used Microsoft solution on the planet, that's a win for everybody involved.

Sam Busch: It's a big win.

Colin: Yeah. So through the voice enablement platform and then some other clever stuff that we do that attaches onto that, that makes it a whole lot easier to use Teams as a company versus going and buying everybody a cell phone versus going and making sure that everybody's got a phone on their desk, which is. I mean, we're done with that. I think we're really. Yeah.

Sam Busch: I come from. I think it was. It's technically 11 years in supply chain. I just left supply chain for accounts payable, which is insanity. But the supply chain girl in me knows all too well about that. I think I've been in more warehouses than I've been in malls in my life. Like, I love a warehouse. It's, um, almost something so soothing about a warehouse. But to think about the warehouse employees not having a phone. Right. It's crazy.

Colin: Yeah.

Sam Busch: They have to operate. Yeah.

Colin: So I think that, you know, one of our goals as we're, as we're working through this is the closer you can get someone to the. To the mobile phone, I think the better we all are.

Sam Busch: Oh, yeah.

Colin: Because that's the easiest thing to facilitate.

Sam Busch: Exactly.

Colin: And through a, uh, through another partner in a similar situation, this company we were working with buying everybody cell phones so they could text them. That was it.

Sam Busch: That's.

Colin: That's why they needed it.

Sam Busch: Interesting.

Colin: Yeah. So, I mean, just think what it costs to have.

Sam Busch: Huh. Cell phone, to have a plan to have coverage.

Colin: Right. And so when you can just remove that and put your cloud communications app on your phone.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: And use texting through that and.

Sam Busch: Exactly.

Colin: Calling through that. And use communication through that and even push to talk.

Sam Busch: Oh, I like this.

Colin: Um, just think of the dollars that you keep in your pocket.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: Wow. You can use to do other better stuff. Wow.

Sam Busch: Because an iPhone now, I think, is like pushing $2,000 at this point.

Colin: Yeah. And I mean, if you need 700 of them.

Sam Busch: Yeah. We can't do that.

Colin: It could get untidy.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: You know, um, and also, they're going to break. They're going to go in the toilet. People are going to misplace them. They're going to. And you're going to have to give them a new one because you don't have an alternative. Except now you do.

Sam Busch: Now you do. Now it's download and move on.

Colin: Yeah. Bring your own device. Collect our little stipend for it. Put all the apps you need on that thing.

Sam Busch: Cool.

Colin: You don't have to have a desk phone. You don't even have to have a computer with you.

Sam Busch: Good for you.

Colin: Yeah.

Sam Busch: It's exciting.

Colin: And so the bullseye is there's a lot of people in this ISV community that are connected to a different type of customer than the ones that we connect to directly.

Sam Busch: Yep.

Colin: The 750 Mobility customer is not for everybody here.

Sam Busch: Sure.

Colin: And that's okay. That's great. And we want to make sure that the people in that part of the market are also getting a chance to interact with us in that way. So we're doing that through partnerships.

Sam Busch: Okay.

Colin: Where people have relationships with customers and they're close, they can bring the correct solution. And if it's us, that's awesome.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: If it's not. That's also awesome because I think as we're building the community here to sort of bubble of trust in the ISP world, it's a whole lot more important. We kind of are able to take each other seriously.

Sam Busch: Totally.

Colin: Than it is that we're all just swapping our dollars back.

Sam Busch: Yep, yep, yep. I love that. I love that. I think your first directions, you just nailed it on the head of. Of what this is all about. Right.

Colin: Everybody here is, Is given they're. They're just exemplary and I've not felt out of place, which normally you do. I mean, a lot of these are.

Sam Busch: When you're new to stuff, you're. You feel like you're on the outside. And here it's like we all have our micro groups and our. I wouldn't call them a clique, but I would kind of. But here it's like, you can come in if you want. The water's warm here. You just have to jump in.

Colin: I've seen the clicks, but they're not,

Sam Busch: you know, but we're still not exclusive.

Colin: There's not friction.

Sam Busch: Yeah, yeah. And a lot of my favorite thing is some of my best friends that I've met through this channel that are actually my best friends, like, fly in for my birthday party best friends. They are competitors of mine and we don't care. We're living, loving, laughing, all together doing these things.

Colin: And it's.

Sam Busch: Yeah, it's wildly refreshing. I never got that in netsuite, I'll tell you that.

Colin: Well, we're all playing on the same court.

Sam Busch: Uh, yeah.

Colin: At some point too, there is the chance that you'll become teammates.

Sam Busch: Well, yeah, I mean, we're in the world of, um, M and A always in this channel. Especially if you're at a bar. Like these bars, they lock and load and absorb so often. But I'm seeing a lot of it happen in the, like, AI emerging tech space specifically right now, as we should. But a lot of like, like we're launching something. I've got a couple friends who are like, we're trying to buy this kind of company, if you know of anybody. And those are the conversations we're having here is like, who should we buy?

Colin: It's. And so, uh, as I mentioned, we work in the broadband space a lot. And now if you're a company that can competently build fiber and reach homes with that fiber.

Sam Busch: Yeah.

Colin: You drive down Wall street with your windows down, they will just throw money in your.

Sam Busch: Wow. Wow.

Colin: I need to do that to try and acquire you.

Sam Busch: Maybe that would pay off my college debt.

Colin: That's. That's where. That's the connection. Right. Everything that we're doing, all the. The applications and the mobility and all that stuff is all for. Not if you don't have anything run into the actual income.

Sam Busch: Exactly.

Colin: And so that infrastructure part of the world has really helped us kind of launch into this, uh, the ability to come work in the ISV space.

Sam Busch: Love it.

Colin: And work with. With you guys to try and help everybody kind of get their. Their piece of it.

Sam Busch: Very cool. Very cool. All right, well, let's wrap this up. Is there anything else you want to talk about or share?

Colin: We're here. We'll probably continue to be here. I don't think this will be my last. I hope not, because this is fun. This is the most fun thing that I've done so far. And rocks was pretty fun last night. You set the bar way.

Sam Busch: See, I told you this was going to be good before we sat down.

Colin: Yeah.

Sam Busch: Was it?

Colin: I felt it.

Sam Busch: Okay, good. Okay, good. Welcome into the community of Ambush. I'm happy to have you. Um, to everyone listening, thank you so much for your support. If you see me in my custom T shirts this week, stop by, say hi, um, and then, as always, thank you for listening and party on.